Ceres Isn’t the Icy Dwarf Planet We Thought It Was

The asteroid belt hides lots of mysteries of the solar system’s past, but perhaps no place holds more mysteries than Ceres. It’s an oddball place — a dwarf planet in the midst of our solar system’s belt of smaller debris. And it’s an ancient world possibly left over from the era when the planets first came together.
New findings from the NASA Dawn Vesta/Ceres probe published today in Nature and Nature Geosciences only make it more intriguing.